Hard Rain

is changeless,
    and I had no difficulty finding what drew me despite the decades that
    had passed since I had last come here.
    The marker was stark and simple, distinguished only by a brief
    declaration that Fujiwara Shuichi had lived from 1912 to 1960 and that
    all that remained of him was interred here. Fujiwara Shuichi, my
    father, killed in the street riots that rocked Tokyo one awful summer
    while I was a boy.
    I stood before the grave and maintained a long bow, my palms pressed
    together before my face in the Buddhist attitude of respect for the
    dead. My mother would have wanted me to say a prayer, crossing myself
    at its conclusion, and had this been her grave, I would have done so.
    But such a western ritual would have been an insult to my father in his
    life, and why would I do something to offend him now?
    I smiled. It was hard to avoid that kind of thinking. My father was
    dead.
    Still, I offered no prayer.
    I waited a moment, then lowered myself, cross-legged, to the earth.
    Some of the graves were adorned with flowers, in various stages of
    freshness and decay. As though the dead could smell the bouquets.
    A breeze sighed among the markers. I put my forehead in my palms and
    stared at the ground before me.
    People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend
    more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual
    than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to
    portraits, or mantelpiece urns. Some go to spots favored by the
    deceased during life, or mouth silent prayers in houses of worship, or
    have trees planted in memory in some far-off land.
    The common denominator, of course, is a sense beyond logic that the
    dead are aware of all this, that they can hear the prayers and witness
    the deeds and feel the ongoing love and longing. People seem to find
    that sense comforting.
    I don't believe any of it. I've never seen a soul depart from a body.
    I've never been haunted by a ghost, angry or loving. I've never been
    rewarded or punished or touched by some traveler from the undiscovered
    country. I know as well as I know anything that the dead are simply
    dead.
    I sat silently for several minutes, resisting the urge to speak,
    knowing it was stupid. There was nothing left of my father. Even if
    there were, it was ridiculous to believe that it would be here,
    hovering around ashes and dust, jostling for position among the souls
    of the hundreds of thousands of others buried in this place.
    People lay the flowers and say the prayers, they believe these things,
    because doing so avoids the discomfort of acknowledging that the person
    you loved is gone. It's easier to believe that maybe the person can
    still see and hear and care.
    I looked at my father's marker. It was young by the standards of the
    cemetery, just over four decades, but already it was darkened by
    pollution. Moss grew thin and insensate up its left side. Without
    thinking, I reached out and ran my fingers over the raised lettering of
    my father's name.
    " Hisashiburi, papa," I whispered, addressing him like the young boy I
    had been when he had died. It's been a long time, papa.
    Forgive me father. It has been thirty years since my last
    confession.
    Stop that shit.
    "I'm sorry I don't come to visit you more often," I said in Japanese,
    my voice low. "Or even think of you. There are so many things I keep
    at a distance because they're painful. Your memory is one of those
    things. The first of them, in fact'
    I paused for a moment and considered the silence around me. "But
    you're not listening, anyway."
    I looked around. "This is stupid," I said. "You're dead. You're not
    here."
    Then I dropped my head into my hands again. "I wish I could make her
    understand," I said. "I wish you could help me."
    Damn, she'd been hard on me. Called me a whore.
    Maybe it wasn't unfair. After all, killing is the ultimate expression
    of hatred and fear, as sex is the ultimate expression of love and
    desire. And, as with sex, killing a stranger who has otherwise
    provoked no emotion is inherently unnatural. I suppose you could say
    that a man who kills a stranger is not unlike a woman who has sex under
    analogous circumstances. That a man who is paid to kill is like a
    woman who is paid to fuck. Certainly the man is subject to the same
    reluctance, the same numbing, the same regrets. The same damage to the
    soul.
    "But goddamn it," I said aloud, 'is it moral to kill someone you don't
    even know, a grunt probably just like yourself,